Great Band Name

Does a great band name inevitably spell doom for its band? That's what an article in today's SF Chronicle posits.

Giving your band a creative name is a surefire harbinger of doom (which is, incidentally, a great name for a band). From the moment members of ... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead and the Brian Jonestown Massacre chose their inspired and memorable names, they were guaranteed to never headline a venue larger than the Warfield. It was similarly over before it started for John Cougar Concentration Camp, a punk rock band that was musically halfway decent, and can now be found only in the nether regions of the Amoeba Music clearance bins.

The theory is that the better-sounding your band name the less likely you are to make it to the top of the lineup of a show, for instance. That theory works if you only name successful bands with bad names (Creed, Destiny's Child, U2 even), and certainly the trend is to spell as badly as possible (Linkin Park Ludacris). Still, there are a ton of successful bands out there with excellent names so I'm kind of not seeing this theory holding much water.